Mid-week short takes: Ireland’s HealthBeacon bought by Hamilton Beach (!), Ambience AI raises $70M, VA to develop VR mental health app with Mynd Immersive

February 7, 2024 | by

Dublin’s HealthBeacon PLC has been sold to Hamilton Beach Health. HealthBeacon is an app platform/device/injection care management system that integrates with patient support programs to remind them to inject their medications on schedule. Since its formation in 2021, Hamilton Beach Health has marketed the HealthBeacon Smart Sharps Bin in the US. HealthBeacon was founded in 2013, currently has 50 employees and operates in the UK, Europe, North America, and Australia. Acquisition cost was not disclosed, but HealthBeacon’s current investors over 10%, according to their investor page, are Cantor Fitzgerald Ireland Client Nominees Limited, Oyster Capital Investments Limited, James Joyce (CEO), and Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management.

Kieran Daly, a co-founder of HealthBeacon, will run day-to-day operations reporting to Rob George, VP of Hamilton Beach Brands, now Global General Manager. This Editor had surprisingly never heard that Hamilton Beach, associated more with kitchen appliances, had a Health division among the mixers, electric kettles, and garment steamers. Release

Ambience Healthcare raised a healthy $70 million Series B. It was led by Kleiner Perkins and OpenAI Startup Fund. Ambience Healthcare is (naturally) in the hot healthcare AI sector with four applications (soon to be five) described as an ‘operating system’ for the end-to-end patient journey through nearly all specialties and integration with six major EHRs. Current deployments are with UCSF, Memorial Hermann Health System, John Muir Health, The Oncology Institute, GI Alliance, Midi Health, and Eventus WholeHealth. Results claimed are reduction in documentation time by an average of 78%, improvement in coding integrity, and at least a 5X return on investment. Release

VA to develop VR extended reality (XR) mental health app with Mynd Immersive. Mynd’s market has generally been in senior and post-acute care as a digital therapeutic using the HTC Vive VR glasses and programming ranging from speech, cognition, and behavioral therapies to recreation and pleasant distraction. Mynd is used by the VA in 100 long-term care facilities across the country. The new VA/Mynd partnership is targeted to Vietnam veterans to provide them with virtual journeys created specifically for Vietnam veterans via a project titled “Virtual Vietnam: A Path to Peace.” As this generation is now reaching their senior years, old conditions such as PTSD and new ones such as isolation occur, reviving or exacerbating Vietnam War memories. The Virtual Vietnam project is a three-year cooperative research and development agreement. Healthcare IT News, VA/Mynd release  TTA 9 Nov 23 on Mynd’s recent study on effectiveness with Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. 

Get your goggles on! Augmented and virtual reality finally taking off, from alleviating child pain to astronaut mental health

November 9, 2023 | by

Augmented and virtual reality (AR, VR) back at last.  A few years ago, the future of everything from rehabilitation to PTSD was going to be headsets/goggles and captivating programming. Alas, it went sideways. Now a revival is taking place:

  • The Smileyscope VR platform from Australia recently received the very first Class II FDA clearance for acute pain and anxiety reduction via VR. In September, they received clearance for temporary relief of acute anxiety associated with needle procedures. Using what they term “virtual reality neuromodulation”. their Procedural Choreography technique uses positive virtual stimuli and substitution–for example, replacing a negative real-world stimuli such as a needle, replacing it with a positive virtual stimuli such as a friendly fish. According to their studies submitted for the Class II filing, self-rated pain in children was reduced up to 60% and anxiety of up to 40%. It also achieved reductions of up to 75% in caregiver distress and reduced the use of physical restraints up to 48%. Smileyscope is working with about 50 US hospitals and the NHS. Globally it has been used to reduce pain and anxiety for other procedures such as administering vaccines, bloodwork, wound dressings, anesthetic inductions, cast applications/removals, and medical imaging, thus avoiding sedation especially in children. Smileyscope has partnered with over 50 US hospitals to implement the technology.     Release, Healthcare IT News
  • VR in senior care was explored in a study from Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. The survey of 245 older adults and 39 caregivers in 16 senior care communities across 10 states was highly positive about VR use:
    • 81% of surveyed caregivers reported they enjoyed interacting with residents more using VR than other activities.
    • 94.9% said that using VR was “moderately to extremely beneficial to their relationship” with the patient, while 89.5% of senior care residents reported the same in their relationships with the staff.
    • 74.2% of the caregivers reported that the residents’ moods were improved, while 77.9% of the residents reported feeling more positive.
    • 57.5% of older adults reported feeling less isolated from the outside world after using VR during the study.

Mynd Immersive, formerly MyndVR, AT&T 5G Healthcare, HTC Vive, a maker of 5G products, and a group of rehabilitation and senior living communities, like John Knox Village in Pompano Beach, Florida, collaborated with Stanford on the research. Release (Yahoo Finance), HIT Consultant

  • Clinician training for naloxone (Narcan) has received the VR treatment. Before the pandemic in 2019-2020, University of Pennsylvania researchers found that VR training was as effective as standard in-person training for naloxone administration to treat opioid overdose. The immersive, locally tailored nine-minute video produced by the Penn School of Nursing and the Annenberg Center for Communications was released on 27 October for first use in Camden County New Jersey. Camden has an ongoing naloxone program to train students, staff and school administrators, bus drivers, and other entities that carry Naloxone. Camden County
  • And Space, the Final Frontier, is another place where VR will be tested to improve astronauts’ mental health. A collaboration between XRHealth, Nord-Space Aps, and HTC Vive will use the latter’s Focus 3 headset to deliver “virtual assistance mental balance” to help improve astronauts’ specific mental health needs during their six to eight-month missions. The headset, modified to withstand microgravity, and programs will be used in the upcoming NASA Crew-7 mission. Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen will be the testing astronaut. Back here on the ground, XRHealth distributed hundreds of virtual reality headsets in Israel to 30 hospitals, assisted living and mental health centers, and nursing homes to assist patients suffering from stress, PTSD, and anxiety. Mobihealthnews

Four ‘moonshot’ health tech startups aiding cognition and brain health (podcast)

July 1, 2021 | by

This 30 minute podcast interviews four tech entrepreneurs in the StartUp Health Health Transformers accelerator/funding ‘moonshot’ program. Their focus is on technologies designed to improve brain health and address issues around cognitive impairment and disease.

  • Amir Bozorgzadeh, CEO & Co-founder of Virtuleap, a Lisbon-based company that uses VR and gamification in the Enhance VR brain training app for a daily cognitive workout of short, intense, and fun games
  • Kate Rosenbluth, PhD, Chief Science Officer & Founder at Cala Health, Cala Trio is a wrist-worn stimulator that reduces hand tremor for people with essential tremor (ET). Up until this therapeutic device, the only option for ET was a stimulator inserted in a key portion of the brain. 
  • Maor Cohen, CEO & Co-founder of n*gram health, uses immersive digital experiences and augmented reality delivered via smartphone and tablet for assessment, evaluation, and improvement in older adults with cognitive impairment.
  • Mark Cavicchia, RC21X co-founder. RC21X has developed two brain and human performance assessment tools, Roberto and RC21X. These provide brain performance trend data that can be used in healthcare, for monitoring treatment and recovery plan effectiveness, as well as industrial safety.

All these businesses are well along in proven technology and funding, a trend we’ve been finding with accelerators that once specialized in startups barely out of seed and still proving their models. Cala Health, for example, we noted in 2016 with its $18 million raise, but has been around since 2013. RC21X, once Home Base, also has been around since 2013.

The podcast is hosted by India Edwards and Logan Plaster. Mr. Plaster, StartUpHealth’s media director, and this Editor worked together on an article about the late Viterion Digital Health in his previous venture with Telemedicine Magazine. 

Medical education going digital, virtual, and virtual reality (US/UK)

August 19, 2020 | by

How do you educate medical and nursing students when class is no longer in session? What about clinical training when hospitals are restricted due to COVID? It’s no surprise that remote learning and pre-recorded classes plus active lecturer-student discussions on Zoom (or more secure video meeting platforms) in the spring filled the gap of the first two years of med school, which are primarily tied to class instruction. For incoming and resuming classes, most have a mix of online and in-person classes, depending on school location. Nursing schools faced and resolved similar situations.

But what happens in the second two years, when lectures mix with in-person clinical learning? Most schools pulled students from clinical work in the spring, but some, like Mount Sinai in New York, continued. The University of Houston has developed some other approaches. Their medical school, starting this year, was co-founded with insurance payer Humana as part of the Humana Integrated Health Systems Science Institute. Nursing school students who would typically join nurses on house calls shadowed these nurses on virtual visits as part of their clinical training. 

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is also looking at ways to integrate telehealth into medical school curricula, and is publishing a guide this fall detailing core competencies around telemedicine.  FierceHealthcare

Virtual reality (VR) is providing a more interactive training environment for clinicians with realistic scenarios and feedback. Computer simulations have been common for years in specialty surgery and diagnostics. With reductions in pricing on headsets like the Oculus Rift and Quest, several companies are introducing a different kind of virtual visit, one in a realistic clinic setting, simulating a pressured situation. These come complete with interaction between doctors, nurses, and other clinicians, can be ‘multi-player’, and provide performance analysis/feedback. This Editor noted Oxford Medical Simulation’s work with NHS England in Wessex on treatment for diabetic emergencies [News Roundup, TTA 3 Apr 19] and another pilot at OxSTaR (Oxford Simulation, Teaching and Research) center [News Roundup, TTA 8 Aug 19]. In surgery, Southern Methodist University (which has a leading graduate school for video game design), Virti, and Medical Realities (the latter two UK firms) have pioneered training in US, UK, and Europe plus specialized trainings for surgeons in Africa replicating conditions faced in ORs there. The trainings not only teach procedure, but reduce surgeon and fellow clinician stress. Digital Trends

CES roundup: what happened to the excitement around ‘innovation’, robots, VR, and voice assistants?

January 10, 2020 | by

What’s missing? Some sense of excitement. It may be your Editor’s back-to-work deluge after the holiday, but it’s hard not to have a sense of Déjà Vu All Over Again when reading the reporting from CES Las Vegas. So much of it seems lukewarm, a variant of what felt exciting, new, and transformative Back When. And so little of it seems to break through to a wider market. Let’s pick through and see what a Gimlet Eye might.

AARP’s Innovation Labs had yet another showcase of technologies from largely small companies from its own Hatchery and other accelerators with which it works. This year it highlighted VR developer partnerships with Rendever, which creates experiences for LTC residents, and VRHealth’s physical therapy at home. SanaHealth has a pulsed light/sound pain reduction device and the VoiceItt speech recognition device which translates the speech of the severely impaired into intelligible language.

Robots continue to seek a market, albeit tinier and we confess, occasionally more amusing.

  • Samsung’s Ballie robot, about the size of an orange, will roll through your home minding your pets, monitoring your safety, and interfacing with your smart devices and apps to make absolutely sure you get enough exercise and track your fitness. That is, if you don’t step on it, mistake it for a tennis ball, or your dog doesn’t mistake it for a chew toy.
  • The Charmin Rollbot will deliver a pre-loaded roll when you most need it, navigating through your home, although no capability of climbing stairs in its current concept.
  • The Misty II robot is yet again one of those tabletop robots which are developer toys. This one propels itself and has a camera, a microphone and 3D sensors, and could be repurposed for fall detection, companionship, or to bring you a hot towel.
  • The Lovot is a Japanese robot at its second CES which moves around, responds, is red and quite cuddly-looking (except for that weird thing on the top of its head). This ‘happiness robot’ will set you back over ¥299,000 ($2,700) when it finally hits the market.

Babies need both monitoring and changing, and combining the two may actually happen. P&G’s Pampers and Verily Life Sciences brought to CES the Lumi smart diaper with a connected HD video monitor plus an activity sensor in the diaper. It will detect baby’s sleep, feeding and diapering patterns. (But no changing by the Charmin Rollbot)

Voice assistants are getting more ubiquitous to find a way into the home. The war between Amazon Alexa (and siblings) and Google Assistant continues with new applications in cars (a/k/a computers on four wheels) to appliances and a host of third-party devices like garage door openers. A lot of this is ‘sneaky tech’ to get past the hard core of people who have already realized that both always-on Alexa and Assistant collect a lot of behavioral data which one does not necessarily want collected, and that many of these connected devices like Nest have been hijacked through compromised passwords.

More in Fierce Healthcare 7 Jan, 9 Jan; Mobihealthnews

Japan as aging bellwether: experiential VR, claim that robots increase activity by 50 percent

February 9, 2018 | by

Japan’s population is the oldest on average in the world, with over 27 percent of its population aged over 65 and the highest average life expectancy at 83.7 years. Writer Shiho Fukada spent a year researching aging tech supported by the Pulitzer Center. In STAT, he profiles innovation in two areas we’ve highlighted previously: VR experiences for those who are restricted in their mobility and the effect of robots in elder care.

Bringing experiences to the older person. A Tokyo therapist, Kenta Toshima, takes videos of his travels to 29 countries and 55 cities, then shares them with his patients on a smartphone mounted on an inexpensive cardboard viewer to simulate full VR. His concept, Virtually Able, has positive results and he is trying to develop a study. Yet in the US, Dr. Sonya Kim has been developing this in a commercial model via OneCaringTeam and Aloha VR.  [TTA 21 Nov 16 and 11 Nov 17] These VR experiences for residents of long-term care are being researched for easing anxiety, increasing positive feelings, stimulation, and connectedness in older people with mobility difficulties or dementia, with Cedars-Sinai in LA evaluating VR for pain reduction with mixed results.

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Pepper-daughter.jpg” thumb_width=”200″ /]Robotics in monitoring and connectedness. It’s another look at Palro and Pepper [TTA 24 Oct 17], this time in action at the Flos Higashi-kojiya Senior Care Facility in Tokyo, at a nursing home run by the Social Welfare Corporation of Tokyo Seishinkai, and in a home with an older couple. Robots, as we’ve noted, are stepping in the care and connectedness gap.

  • For older adults living at home by themselves, interactive robots like Pepper can aid with tasks but as you’ll see in the video, the wide-eyed Pepper becomes a ‘daughter-bot’ (left and above from the video) that remarkably increases engagement between this older couple in a typically crowded Japanese home.
  • In Japan, as in the West, there’s a shortage of care staff able to engage with residents in senior living. In the video, Palro struts across a table to the admiration of a group of older women in assisted living and leads them in an exercise routine.
  • In a Tokyo nursing home, a Guardian desktop robot not only monitors the well-being of patients in nursing care using audio and video, but also communicates interactively with the patient to give a feeling of personal attention and encouragement. Mr. Fukada at 06:14 quotes a study that residents living with robots are 50 percent more active and that 70 percent without robots are less active, but unfortunately this is not footnoted.

What is evident is that Japan continues to pioneer in robotics for care of older adults and in general (CES), but the takeup in other countries, with some exception for Europe, is not that great–yet. Previously in TTA: Japan’s workarounds for adult care shortage, Japan’s hard lessons on an aging population

 

CES Unveiled’s preview of health tech at CES 2018

November 11, 2017 | by

CES Unveiled, Metropolitan Pavilion, NYC, Thursday 9 November

The Consumer Technology Association’s (CTA) press preview of the gargantuan CES 9-12 January 2018 Las Vegas event was the first of several international preview ‘road shows’. It’s a benchmark of the ebb and flow of health tech and related trends on the grand scale. Gone are the flashy wearables which would change colors based on our sweat patterns and heart rate, or track the health and movement of pets. Now it’s the Big Issues of 5G, AI, machine learning, AR/VR, and smart cities. Entertainment, especially sports, are now being reinvented by all of these.

The developments this Editor gleaned from the mountain of information CEA plies us keyboard tappers that are most relevant to healthcare are:

  • Wireless 5G. As this Editor has written previously from Ericsson and Qualcomm, 5G and 5G New Radio will enable amazingly fast mobile speeds and hard-to-believe fast connectivity by 2019. It will enable IoT, self-driving cars, cars that communicate with each other, reconstruction of industrial plants, electric distribution, multimodal transport, and perhaps the largest of all, smart cities. The automation of everything is the new mantra. Accenture estimates the impact will be 3 million new jobs (nothing about loss), annual GDP increased by $500bn, and drive a $275bn investment from telecom operators.
  • AI.  Society will be impacted by machine learning, neural networks and narrow (e.g. calorie counting, diagnostics) versus general AI (simulation of human intelligence). This affects voice-activated assistants like Echo, Alexa, and Google Home (now owned by 12 percent of the population, CES survey) as well as robotics to ‘read’ us better. These conversations with context may move to relationships with not only these assistants but home robots such as from Mayfield Robotics’ Kuri (which this Editor attempted to interact with on the show floor, to little effect and disappointment). Oddly not mentioned were uses of AI in ADL and vital signs tracking interpreted for predictive health.
  • Biometrics. This will affect security first in items like padlocks (the new Bio-Key Touchlock) using fingerprint recognition and smart wallets, then facial recognition usable in a wide variety of situations such as workplaces, buildings, and smartphones. Imagine their use in items like key safes, phones, home locks, and waypoints inside the home for activity monitoring.
  • AR and VR. Power presence now puts viewers in the middle of a story that is hard to distinguish from reality. The pricing for viewers is dropping to the $200-400 range with Oculus Go and Rift. At the Connected Health Conference, this Editor saw how VR experiences could ease anxiety and disconnectedness in older people with mobility difficulties or dementia (OneCaringTeam‘s Aloha VR) or pain reduction (Cedars-Sinai tests). The other is Glass for those hands-on workers [TTA 24 July] and heads-up displays in retail.

CES is also hosting the fourth Extreme Tech Challenge. Of the ten semi-finalists showing down on 11 January, three are in healthcare: Neurotrack to assess and improve memory; Tissue Analytics that uses smartphone cameras to assess wounds and healing; and (drum roll) the winner of TTA’s Insanely Cute Factor competition, the Owlet smart sock for baby monitoring [TTA’s backfile here]. One of the judges is Sir Richard Branson, who will host the finalists on 28 February on Necker Island (which hopefully will be rebuilt by that time).

After the nearly two-hour briefing, CEA hosted a mini-show on the ground floor of the Metropolitan. (more…)

Themes and trends at Aging2.0 OPTIMIZE 2017

November 10, 2017 | by

Aging2.0 OPTIMIZE, in San Francisco on Tuesday and Wednesday 14-15 November, annually attracts the top thinkers and doers in innovation and aging services. It brings together academia, designers, developers, investors, and senior care executives from all over the world to rethink the aging experience in both immediately practical and long-term visionary ways.

Looking at OPTIMIZE’s agenda, there are major themes that are on point for major industry trends.

Reinventing aging with an AI twist

What will aging be like during the next decades of the 21st Century? What must be done to support quality of life, active lives, and more independence? From nursing homes with more home-like environments (Green House Project) to Bill Thomas’ latest project–‘tiny houses’ that support independent living (Minkas)—there are many developments which will affect the perception and reality of aging.

Designers like Yves Béhar of fuseproject are rethinking home design as a continuum that supports all ages and abilities in what they want and need. Beyond physical design, these new homes are powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology that support wellness, engagement, and safety. Advances that are already here include voice-activated devices such as Amazon Alexa, virtual reality (VR), and IoT-enabled remote care (telehealth and telecare).

For attendees at Aging2.0, there will be substantial discussion on AI’s impact and implications, highlighted at Tuesday afternoon’s general session ‘AI-ging Into the Future’ and in Wednesday’s AI/IoT-related breakouts. AI is powering breakthroughs in social robotics and predictive health, the latter using sensor-based ADL and vital signs information for wellness, fall prevention, and dementia care. Some companies part of this conversation are CarePredict, EarlySense, SafelyYou, and Intuition Robotics.

Thriving, not surviving

Thriving in later age, not simply ‘aging in place’ or compensating for the loss of ability, must engage the community, the individual, and providers. There’s new interest in addressing interrelated social factors such as isolation, life purpose, food, healthcare quality, safety, and transportation. Business models and connected living technologies can combine to redesign post-acute care for better recovery, to prevent unnecessary readmissions, and provide more proactive care for chronic diseases as well as support wellness.

In this area, OPTIMIZE has many sessions on cities and localities reorganizing to support older adults in social determinants of health, transportation innovations, and wearables for passive communications between the older person and caregivers/providers. Some organizations and companies contributing to the conversation are grandPad, Village to Village Network, Lyft, and Milken Institute.

Technology and best practices positively affect the bottom line

How can senior housing and communities put innovation into action today? How can developers make it easier for them to adopt innovation? Innovations that ‘activate’ staff and caregivers create a multiplier for a positive effect on care. Successful rollouts create a positive impact on both the operations and financial health of senior living communities.

(more…)

CHC breaking news: Qualcomm on 5G’s $1T impact, Think Fast stroke VR

October 26, 2017 | by

From the Connected Health Conference in Boston

Qualcomm announced today two releases: an analysis on the effects of 5G mobile on the healthcare sector and the Think Fast virtual reality (VR) simulation program for stroke diagnosis.

5G Mobile: Qualcomm’s study, “5G Mobile: Impact on the Health Care Sector”, found that 5G’s increased data speed, reliability, and security will have a substantial and positive impact on healthcare both in quality and financially. 

  • It will enable the ‘personalization of healthcare’ through permitting the continuous real-time gathering of healthcare data through sensors and on the back end, to process that data usefully. Qualcomm calls this the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) which works for this Editor as long as the devices and apps are secure. (Having worked in telehealth where network drops and latency in many areas, particularly rural, often made check-in via tablet connectivity a matter of the stars aligning right, this is good news–Ed. Donna)
  • It will better support remote diagnosis and imaging, including the application of VR
  • It will facilitate distributed computing, which is data processing closer to the patient, for the greater use of predictive analytics 
  • Faster and more data will help in the transition from volume-based to value-based/outcome-based care
  • Financial impact is estimated by IHS Markit at more than $1.1 trillion in global sales in healthcare by 2035. broken down as follows:
    • $453bn in the healthcare vertical: hospitals, doctors, medical equipment, pharma
    • $409bn in supply chain and related
    • $253bn in added value sectors: payers, data analytics providers, cloud data services

The study was authored by Prof. David J. Teece, Tusher Center for Intellectual Capital, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and supported by Qualcomm. Study PDF.  Previously in TTA: Ericsson’s less rosy 5G international healthcare survey [TTA 13 June].

Think Fast VR: FAST–Facial drooping, arm weakness, speech difficulties and time to call emergency services–is the acronym for what to watch for when someone is having a stroke. But if you could observe it in reality, it would be far less ambiguous and more memorable. Think Fast is a VR simulation program that lets the user (a med student, nurse, healthcare educator, or average person) observe a stroke’s effects as if it was happening to them. By stepping inside a stroke victim’s world, it educates on warning signs and critical steps for care. It was designed by ForwardXP using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon VR SDK and Unity 5.6 plugin. Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death in America and a leading cause of adult disability–which can be minimized or prevented with quick response within three hours. Video below. Hat tip to Ashley Settle of Weber Shandwick

Technology for Aging in Place, 2017 edition preview

March 7, 2017 | by

Industry analyst Laurie Orlov previews her annual review of ‘Technology for Aging In Place’ on LinkedIn with six insights into the changes roiling health tech in the US. We’ll start with a favorite point–terminology–and summarize/review each (in bold), not necessarily in order.

“Health Tech” replaces “Digital Health,” begins acknowledging aging. This started well before Brian Dolan’s acknowledgment in Mobihealthnews, as what was ‘digital health’ anyway? This Editor doesn’t relate it to a shift in investment money, more to the 2016 realization by companies and investors that care continuity, meaningful clinician workflow, access to key information, and predictive analytics were a lot more important–and fundable–than trying to figure out how to handle Data Generated by Gadgets.

Niche hardware will fade away – long live software and training. Purpose-built ‘senior tablets’ will likely fade away. The exception will be specialized applications in remote patient monitoring (RPM) for vital signs and in many cases, video, that require adaptation and physical security of standard tablets. These have device connectivity, HIPAA, and FDA (Class I/II) concerns. Other than those, assistive and telehealth apps on tablets, phablets and smartphones with ever-larger screens are enough to manage most needs. An impediment: cost (when will Medicare start assisting with payments for these?), two-year life, dependence on vision, and their occasionally befuddling ways.

Voice-first interfaces will dominate apps and devices. “Instead we will be experimenting with personal assistants or AI-enabled voice first technologies (Siri, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Cortana) which can act as mini service provider interfaces – find an appointment, a ride, song, a restaurant, a hotel, an airplane seat.” In this Editor’s estimation, a Bridge Too Far for this year, maybe 2018. Considerations are cost, intrusiveness, and accuracy in interpreting voice commands. A strong whiff of the Over-Hyped pervades.

Internet of Things (IoT) replaces sensor-based categories. Sensors are part of IoT, so there’s not much of a distinction here, and this falls into ‘home controls’ which may be out of the box or require custom installation. Adoption again runs into the roadblocks of cost and intrusiveness with older people who may be quite reluctant to take on both. And of course there is the security concern, as many of these devices are insecure, eminently hackable, and has been well documented as such.

Tech-enabled home care pressures traditional homecare providers – or does it? ‘What exactly is tech-enabled care? And what will it be in the future?’ Agreed that there will be a lot of thinking in home care about what $200 million in investment in this area actually means. Is this being driven by compliance, or by uncertainty around what Medicare and state Medicaid will pay for in future?

Robotics and virtual reality will continue — as experiments. Sadly, yes, as widespread adoption means investment, and it’s not there on the senior housing level where there are other issues bubbling, such as real estate and resident safety. There are also liability issues around assistance robotics that have not yet been worked out. Exoskeletons–an assistance method this Editor has wanted to see for several years for older adults and the disabled–seems to be stalled at the functionality/expense/weight level.

Study release TBD

One Caring Team testing virtual reality for dementia and depression treatment, relief

November 21, 2016 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/vr-elderly-2_wide-af9c501d8fea7232e366e38b699ee41ee4040334-s1500-c85.jpg” thumb_width=”250″ /]A San Francisco-based company, One Caring Team, is visiting Bay Area seniors with a treatment that is also a treat–virtual reality headsets that recreate a beach or other relaxing environment. VR has been used with Microsoft Kinect in game-playing in assisted living communities, but the physician-founder Sonya Kim is seeking to give a break most to those older people with dementia or depression. They no longer can travel and their world has grown very small. VR gives them an opportunity to hear and see things they haven’t in a long time, if ever. Versions being tested have both a VR picture, narration on screen and audio; versions for dementia patients skip written ‘bubbles’. The point is to have the clients/patients feel safe, relaxed and welcomed. Some of the results have been that patients start to speak, interact with the pictures intuitively and be more alert, with lasting effects between VR visits. Formal studies have been done in other settings for pain management and for rehab, but this is a new company and concept. One problem is cost: $850 for each Samsung Gear VR headset plus the Galaxy smartphone, but if anything help on VR and social funding is easy to find the Bay Area; founder of the Virtual World Society, the University of Washington’s virtual interface pioneer Dr. Tom Furness, is now One Caring Team’s acting chief technology officer. Washington Post, NPR, F6S.com (Photo from One Caring Team via NPR)

The healthcare future according to Britons before London Technology Week

June 22, 2016 | by

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/ltw-2016-logo1.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]More robots than people, VR visits to the GP and 3D printed human organs were among the predictions in a survey of over 2,000 British adults. Also in their collective vision in the next 20 years (2036) were communications devices being embedded inside the human body (37 percent), a cloned human born by that year (50 percent), clothing connected to the internet (50 percent) and more driverless cars than conventional models. The study was conducted by SMG Insight and YouGov, commissioned by London & Partners, the Mayor of London’s promotional company, in the runup to London Technology Week through 26 June, highlighting London as a global technology hub. According to their release, an EY report ranked London as second only to Silicon Valley as the most likely place to produce the world’s next tech giant. The event also promotes Imperial College London’s Foresight team and their Tech Foresight 2036 on 24 June.  Also ITPro.

Phobic? There’s an app for that.

May 2, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/phobia10.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]Everyone has certain fears or things that have a high ‘eeewwww’ factor (see left). Phobious, a new app, uses virtual reality on a smartphone that after several sessions of gradual exposure, desensitizes the user to potentially disabling fears such as dentists, insects, flying and dogs. (Can it work in the backyard when you’re about to be attacked by bees and Godzilla-sized weeds?–The Gimlet Eye) It was developed by a group from Barcelona by way of Charm City a/k/a Baltimore, Maryland, participating in the prestigiously backed DreamIt Health Baltimore accelerator’s 2014 class. The app is currently available for $49 in the Apple App Store and Google Play, with a 3D goggle device VR system due in September at $149–$299 with two psychology sessions. According to MedCityNews, the founders are seeking $750,000 in funding, plan to develop a clinical quality version and obtain FDA clearance and CE Marking. The progress in VR therapy made in less than four years is startling when this Editor considers the price of the CAREN system (Motek and Polycom) which was tested on Iraq and Afghanistan veterans back in June 2010: $500,000. (Ed. note: if you have a phobia about typos, don’t look at the Phobious website!)